


With Bare Things

by calerine



Series: the reality of everything [1]
Category: Nowhere Boys (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crushes, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Genderfluid Character, Other, Platonic Relationships, Slow Burn, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-18 23:12:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1446310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calerine/pseuds/calerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andy is a scientist. Felix is working on his PhD about myths and magic. The shrine in their flat gets cleaned out more often than the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Mostly, it's gigs and dresses and a whole lot of affection. This is an exploration of their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Bare Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foreignconstellations](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreignconstellations/gifts).



> Note: the parts preluded with positive numbers denote events in the present and those negative, the past. **Warning for discussions of suicide and dysphoria.** For the dedicated amongst you, here's an accompanying [mix](http://8tracks.com/calerine/catch-me-up-on-getting-out-of-here) and [tag](http://jackwidowss.tumblr.com/tagged/project).
> 
> This is for Charlie, with all the love and affection I can muster. (More in the end notes.)

_“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”_

_-_ Virginia Woolf, _The Waves_

 

 **00** ****

Andy’s sleep-talking again tonight. Felix wants to pull a pillow over his face and smother him in his sleep.

You’d expect someone so chatty in the day to be silent at night, just to balance things out but nope. At night, Andy snores and speaks and mumbles what Felix has thought to be incantations, only to be disappointed when they turned out to be chemical formulae. Felix would have killed him by now. Pity he’s so fond of him and his ridiculously elaborate hipster coffee. 

Instead, Felix fumbles for his phone on the side table. It takes a minute for his eyes to focus on _3.46am._ At this point, Andy lets out a particularly loud snort, rolls over and pulls Felix back under the covers with a stray arm, heavy with the weight of fucking death or something.

 _Great_ , now he can’t even surf EverydayWitch on his phone. (He’s been meaning to check out their new fashion line. Now that they’ve teamed up with Wixfolk, it’s going to be so much more than those damn triangular hats.) But he’s trapped in bed with his boyfriend who’s beginning to drool on his shoulder. 

He scrapes his teeth along Andy’s collarbone in revenge and pretends they’re on a quest for Bilbo’s ring. That always makes it easier to fall asleep with Andy’s cold feet on his calves. 

 

**\- 01**

They were seven when they met for the first time, Felix sitting across from Andy on the first day of school and making faces at his tear-streaked cheeks. 

Their teacher told them they were buddies for the year but by the end of the week, Ellen had found Felix. 

Andy had found that he was better with Mike, who was as quiet as him, as content to dig through the soft damp dirt at the base of trees. As Felix and Ellen sat giving other kids dark looks, they catalogued all the bugs they could find. All the bugs they couldn’t, Mike drew in their scrapbook.

Last Monday, Andy tried looking for that scrapbook and found that he’d left it in his parents’ house. 

 

**\- 02**

They were twenty-three when they meet again, through a friend of a friend and armed with memories of high school cliques and humiliation like Pokemon gym badges on their sleeves. It was all a whirlwind. Nothing of a whirlwind romance though - there’s a distinct difference. 

One moment, Felix was stuck at the dining table of a dinner party, bored to tears with some conversation about the stock market. (No lie, he and Ellen had already devised a foolproof strategy of faking an allergy reaction to dairy if it meant they would never be invited to future dinner parties by this one high school friend group.) The next he was getting really annoyed with the dude beside him who was giving him an unsolicited speech about the dangers of using aerosol cans. His glasses were sliding off the bridge of his nose. He had quiet, animated eyes and a grin that saw fit to dance around on the corner of his lips every once in a while. Felix had tuned out of the conversation.

At some point, he was about to shift through a smooth segue way into the chemical makeup of CFCs when Felix remembered with a touch of now growing endearment that this Andy Lau was the same one who had gone on a school excursion with an entire month’s worth of supplies and zombie-fighting gear. (“It’s always important to be prepared for an event of an outbreak of parasitic viruses,” he’d said when Bates had asked. Felix had been overwhelmed both by admiration and jealousy.)

On Andy’s other side, Ellen was eavesdropping their conversation, fiddling with her chipped nails as she pretended to pay attention to another about having two children and a mortgage in three years. Felix caught her eyes, making a face that was a mixture of begging shamelessly and _it was a mistake coming._

So Ellen nudged Andy gently and he blinked, bashful. “Sorry, dinner etiquette, yes right.”

Suddenly, Felix found himself folding his wine-stained napkin and asking “you wanna get out of here?” as if he knew what he was doing when Andy nodded and followed as he weaved through the crowd, the tip of his shoes butting gently against Felix’s heels on irregular steps. 

They spilled out inelegantly onto the porch, out into the night. Stars shone and blinked at them as Felix tapped out a cigarette, clutching the scent of tobacco between cupped hands and crooked teeth. 

Andy shook his head when Felix offered. Instead, he was staring openly at his tattoos; the inky black trails as they coiled and meandered over Felix’s skin, flitting past his elbows and wrists, released into the evening from the edges of his rolled up jacket sleeves. 

“Eyes up here, mister,” Felix joked and in that moment wondered why he wanted so much for Andy to like him. It must have been that memory of that excursion. His massive backpack and the chipper way he’d dragged that baseball bat through the bush - Felix had wondered how _anyone_ could have emptied out his school bag in the canteen and left him scrambling to pick up his torn books. His annoyance had bled out, been replaced by a quiet calm settling deep into his hips. He thought about Andy in Year 10 with his bleached white uniform buttoned all the way to the top, proffering knowledge that no one else wanted. He’d been worth ten of the other kids together, better than all the fucking Trent Longs and Sammys in the entire goddamn world. 

“No, I just - they’re cool.” The grin was back, perched on the lines of Andy’s lips as Felix swung up on the porch bannister, blowing smoke rings into the sky. “You were always pretty cool in school. With Ellen and all that. ”

“Really? I mean high school is hardly a very good time for anyone but, _really?_ ” 

“Yeah I always quite admired you for that, like you never wanted to be _in,_ you know?” Andy gave him a small sincere smile as Felix met his eyes and realised that he was not in the least bit joking. 

“I don’t think anyone would have thought of us as _in._ What with all the gothness and the jokes about hygiene, I wouldn’t exactly call it optimal popular crowd material,” Felix frowned. An ugly feeling stirred in his chest as he stubbed his smoke out against his seat, the damp wood putting out the spark immediately, a quiet sizzle and then nothing. He flicked it into the garden. “You have any of your own? Tattoos?” He focussed on the call of a grasshopper croaking loudly at the moon, it didn’t serve anyone’s interests to think about high school. He was over it; he’d been fine for _years_. 

Andy’s gaze darted to the floor and back, considering. “Promise you won’t laugh,” he said finally, Very Seriously. 

“Okay, scout’s honour.” Felix made a vague sign with his fingers and tapped his chest solemnly. 

Andy frowned. “You were... _never_ a scout, but okay fine, here.” He tucked out, rolled up his dress shirt, angling his back towards the dim porch light and Felix squinted. Sitting above his hip was a coloured imprint of Princess Bubblegum and Finn floating about - it was so _fucking_ _cool_. 

“That’s real wicked, dude. Very badass.” 

Andy choked on an amused sound. “You think so?” He beamed. “I don’t show many people because y’know. ‘It’s not exactly optimal popular crowd material’,” he made air quotes in the air. “But like, I wanna be like them.” 

“When you grow up?” Felix slipped him a grin. 

Andy laughed, a small breathy syllable. “Yeah, when I grow up.”

For a moment, Felix stared out at the street. He listened to the sounds of the dinner party inside, so much life and bustle and all he wanted to do was stay on this porch making conversation with an almost-friend. The wind was cold on his face but tobacco lingered, made his insides as warm as his fingers shoved knuckle-deep his jacket pockets. The alcohol had made everything soft, fuzzy and forgiving around the edges and the night whispered for Felix to get closer. 

“My band’s playing at this pub next Friday, you should come. Maybe, if you want to.” Felix hopped off the porch railing, coming to face out towards the street.

“Oh is it still The Metalheads?”

“Nah, we broke up just before Year 12. This is another one, the fourth one since actually, sound’s still pretty raw but I expect we won’t last very long. The other guys are not the long-term sort.” A breeze blew in, rattling the wooden wind chimes and in the dark, they sounded rather eerie, weird. Andy leaned back against the wall, his head tilting up to rest there. A short exhale escaped. Felix watched his shoulders pull up and sink gradually. 

Felix couldn’t tell if it was the red wine that tingled at the tips of his fingers, but it made him want to ask Andy about his life since they last saw each other on graduation day. When had he become so tall and confident, his face bloomed with emotion and pride for the things he loved. 

Felix wanted to know, he wanted to know _everything_.

Andy nodded, considering. “I’ll be there if work doesn’t take too long.” 

“Cool, cool cool cool.” Andy perked up at the reference. Felix couldn’t wait to tell Ellen how this Andy Lau, _Andy Lau from school,_ had turned into the coolest person in the world. She probably already knew; she _had_ kissed him before after all. “What do you do, anyway?”

“Science,” Andy replied with a crook of his eyebrow, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

*

“So Andy’s pretty cool,” Felix told Ellen on the way home, his hand playing with the change in his pocket. He liked the way they clinked solidly within his palm. They’re walking arm-in-arm, syncing their footsteps together as if they’re in a three-legged race and content with being last place. 

“Yeah, wait till you see what he can do with cornstarch and water, it’s _great._ ” Ellen nodded knowingly. It made Felix feel like he had to return the nod with as much villainous omniscience as he could gather.

 

**\+ 01**

Andy remembers every one of their anniversaries but Felix is the one who keeps the ticket stubs to their first movie and their first concert together, hoarding tangible markers of memories like evidence to a crime scene. He dates them and keeps them in a shoebox, and the shoebox he keeps right at the back of the closet, under Andy’s old hockey stuff and his own dusty scores and instrument bags. 

Their apartment is littered with stacks upon stacks of textbooks thicker than Felix’s forearms, beakers and test tubes, talismans and Felix’s small shrine in the corner of the spare room. It was Felix’s once, before he started crawling into bed with Andy every night, curling up into the alcove of Andy’s narrow shoulders, his acute angles that poking at him and pressing his cold nose into Andy’s collarbones. 

They’ve turned that room into a study now - no more a conscious decision than Andy’s repurposing of their old microwave into science equipment. It’s half filled with books on history, science and myths and half with Felix’s keyboard and Andy’s ongoing experiments. 

Just fyi, the one about the wormholes is pretty much the worst. 

 

**\- 03**

Their first date was probably the one in the pub. Or maybe those don’t count at all, the ones before Andy had rolled over in bed and murmured his midnight confession, terrified that Felix was asleep and terrified that he wasn’t. 

He had turned up at the end of the first set. Felix first noticed the way his navy dress clung to his hips, then how he had filled out his cheeks with blush the shade of cherry blossoms in spring, his lips dark as pomegranate beads. He’d chewed his nails down to the skin. Felix asked _how would you like me to introduce you to my friends tonight?_ Andy blinked slowly, deliberate and disbelieving. In the dim light of the bar, he looked heavensent, red-lipped and pale skin against dark blue. It made Felix want to kiss him, want to drag his stool closer so Andy could rest his palm on his shoulder, his knee under the guise of counterfeit familiarity. 

Andy said, _like you would if I were wearing pants. I prefer male pronouns and terms,_ his voice shaking under the tectonic plates of his words. 

The lights on stage later made it hard for Felix to find Andy, but he tried.

God, how hard he tried, forgetting when it was his turn to sing and catching Andy’s eyes in that instant, both of them bright-eyed and scared of hope. 

*****

After the night had grown deeper, darker and Ellen had left with Lily after telling Andy very sternly to bring Felix home safely, they’d untangled themselves from the crowd and Felix had offered to hold Andy’s purse in his huge pockets. They sat side by side on the edge of the pavement, knees bumping. 

“Actually, I’m working on my PhD.” At the glimmer in Andy’s eyes, Felix found himself hastening to add “it’s on the creation of myths through time, tracing them back to legends and stories and writing and stuff.” The night was humid after a spring shower, the smell of car exhaust hung in the air and they were counting the number of yellow cars that passed by. Andy’s dress had bloomed over the sidewalk, a navy hood over his sheer stockings and dark red heels, fabric rippling in the wake of cars. 

“Sounds cool. Sounds like the type of thing that would require lots of research,” Andy chuckled when Felix puffed out his cheeks, making a face that clearly and vividly epitomised _you have no fucking idea._ “Where are you up to?”

“Still research and filling out admin,” Felix pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you know how many goddamn forms you have to fill in just to write like sixty thousand words on a specialised subject?” Andy shook his head through giggles. Felix was just learning how much of a happy drunk he was. Here shoulder to shoulder on the side of the road in the orange glow of a streetlamp. Ellen had always had gut feelings about the good ones. 

“Listen!” Andy sat up straight suddenly, his mirth gone and his body leaning attentively into the air. “Can you hear that, an owl!”

“No _way,_ ” Felix teased. “An _owl_? Here in _Australia_?” 

Andy shoved him. “You’re terrible.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Felix beamed, taken by the tilt of Andy’s head into the breeze, the softness of his jaw. He fished out his tattered, torn box of cigarettes from the jeans pockets, tapped one out and lit it. “Want one?” 

Andy shook his head. “I’m good, thanks. We should get going soon, or Ellen’ll kill me. Cut me up and bury me under your floor or something.”

“Yeah she’s fearsome, you should be scared.” Felix glanced at Andy, inhaling and listening to the slow burn of paper under the late night soundscape. For a moment, he looked envious almost, then the shift of eyes and lips were gone and he was patient again, waiting for Felix to be done. “Tell me about what you’ve been up to.”

“Well, I’m still doing some entry-level lab work and thinking about moving out from my parents’ place,” Andy slipped Felix a sidelong glance. “So you know, searching around to rent a room and stuff. But you know how it is with housemates, and Gumtree, it’s all pretty dodgy, you never know if you’re potentially signing up to room with a meth addict.” Andy took a good long pull of his beer, leaving lipstick stains around the bottle rim. 

“You should move in with us!” Felix offered around a mouthful of smoke, his words blossoming from his mouth. “I mean the HQ isn’t massive or anything but we’re just looking for one more housemate to split the rent and we’re not meth addicts or anything - at least not the last time I checked. Plus it’ll be cool, right?” 

Andy was grinning by the time Felix drifted off his excited spiel. Then he waited for Felix to crush his cigarette underfoot, grasped the hand he held out and walked them barefoot to his car with his crimson heels dangling from the crook of his fingers. 

 

**\+ 02**

Sometimes on hazy mornings, Felix tumbles out of their study on two hours of sleep. A cheekful of Latin verbs and dust imprinted on his skin after spending the night with his face pressed against centuries-old stories. 

Andy makes him coffee and doesn’t say a word until the sun is high in the afternoon sky, Felix is sprawled out on the couch watching the clouds go roll by, chain-smoking into a cup and absently running his thumb over his beads. Andy kisses his hair, draping his fingers over that wild fringe. His arms are full with two bulging manilla folders and a research paper. He sits, settles down by their rickety coffee table, leaning into Felix’s fingers scritching in his hair.

 

**\- 04**

Andy moved in on a clear Saturday morning, late-Spring.

Ellen found him at their front door with two boxes at his feet. His beat-up Mitsubishi was parked downstairs by the curbside, between their neighbours’ third hand Cadillac and Honda and his nose was swollen from hayfever. The daylight made him look unassuming, normal in his green patterned linen pants, belt slipping over the sharp angles of his hips and sweat beading at his hairline. 

He grinned, said _I’ll retrieve the rest._

When Felix replied _I’ll get those for you_ , what he meant was _it was just the lighting; I’m glad I don’t actually like you as much as I thought I did._

*

Felix should have known it wasn’t the damn lighting. 

After all, Andy was the one with the myopia. _He_ could see perfectly fine, darkness or no and wasn’t there supposed to be a perk to being goth or something? 

Because if there was one, he could really use knowing whether it was the fucking lighting or not that made him want to lay on Andy, make out with him then curl up in his arms and fall asleep there. His feelings were doing incomprehensible things and fuck if he could make sense of it all.

Ellen pet his shoulder sympathetically one Thursday night without any preamble whatsoever. It had been more than a month after Andy had moved in and they were watching a rerun of the Avengers again, calling out _gaaaaay_ whenever Steve Rogers and Tony Stark had A Moment. Felix turned to hear Ellen announcing her condolences for his troubled soul, then clearing her throat loudly in the direction of Andy’s bedroom.

Felix groaned and flopped dramatically into her lap. Damn that stupid lighting, stupid _stupid_ lighting.

 

**\+ 03**

“When did you start presenting?” Felix asks, his feet pull up to plant on the bed. 

Andy puts down his book. Felix’s guitar falls silent, fingers threading between the strings, plucking muffled by his left hand resting against the frets. 

“After high school.” Andy says, chewing on his bottom lip. His voice is guarded, and Felix imagines tiny Andy finding himself, never speaking about it to anyone. Never pressing his face into his best friend’s shoulder, skin crawling with an itch he couldn’t scratch. “In uni. I wanted so badly to present as I came to terms with the fact that I was and _am_ genderfluid but I was picked on enough. Even without that, you know? It just, wasn’t wise.” 

Andy pushes his glasses up, frowns at his sky blue painted nails and Felix follows the line of his sight, ends up on the black lace peeking out from under Andy’s oversized shirt. It was Felix’s until recently. Last week Andy had declared that he was taking hostage of it since he shared the same name with Andy Biersack, thus by unassailable logic, it belonged to him.

“You were taking care of yourself, it isn’t a bad thing.” Felix wants to reach over, wants to hold Andy’s hand and kiss his cheek to convey the things he couldn’t string into words but time stretches out like warm licorice, molten in the heat of day. It weighs down on them, pregnant. Felix feels like he’s gasping, that the day is closing in on them, cupping the room in the heat of mid-afternoon.

“That’s why I looked up to you and Ellen so much, you were never afraid to be you. You were Felix Ferne and Ellen O’Donnell, invincible. It was the two of you against the world. You were out and proud and if people didn’t like it they could fuck off.” 

“I was only strong enough because I had Ellen though. I don’t - I try not to think about what might have happened if I didn’t.” In fact, Felix tries not to think about that period of his life at all. Sometimes it resurfaces at the most inopportune moments like when the hem of Andy’s skirts rub against his knees, like when Ellen’s sat cross-legged on his bed while Gerard Way yells about revolution on his turntable and _he isn’t in his parents’ house anymore._

It’s been so long but not nearly long enough. 

Andy’s fingers walk the tightrope distance between them, tangles with Felix’s. He clutches back tightly. 

“What about your family?” 

Andy grimaces. His thumb runs across the ridges of Felix’s knuckles idly. “They have no idea. It’s never the right time to tell them, I never make promises to visit because I never have any idea what kind of day it would be.” Felix wishes he doesn’t know exactly what Andy means, and why. He thinks about his mother when he first came out, her disappointment when he stopped wearing skirts, when he told her they made him feel like crying. Maybe that’s why they hardly talk to him anymore. 

Maybe it started with his binder and ended with Oscar. All the time, Felix’s head is heavy with could-haves, couldn’t-haves.

“At one point, my dysphoria got so bad I wanted to just. Stop. Everything.” Andy’s eyes are closed off, fearful, shuttered and Felix knows he hasn’t said those words out loud before. He shakes away image after image; Andy measuring out handfuls of pills, Andy falling asleep in his car and never waking up, Andy never turning up at that dinner party, never rolling up his dress shirt to reveal Finn and Princess Bubblegum on his back, never kissing Felix.

“I’m really glad you didn’t.” Felix leans over his guitar, wraps his long lanky arms around Andy, knuckles stroking along the nape of his neck. 

It’s hot, humidity rising with the day. If they throw open their windows now, the scent of wet soil will wash out down their apartment walls, leaving everything rich and damp, of flowers on the verge of bloom.

Andy finally meets Felix’s eyes. He manages a small smile, index finger hooking onto Felix’s in a faint reminiscence of pinky promises.

 

**\- 05**

They made a quiet content home, three planets in a solar system of their own, habits making their orbits a second nature. 

Ellen left for work in the early morning, commuting into the city to a fashion designer’s where she sketched her days away. Her room walls were plastered with design blueprints tacked haphazardly over the peeling paint and alongside frayed band posters. Her style had remained unchanged since she and Felix squirrelled away cans of spray paint to let loose over Bremin on nights they were both too wired up for bed. 

Felix wrote as best he could, holed up in his room for eight hours of the day while taking extended breaks far too frequently. Andy in the early weeks, found him sneaking impromptu naps on the couch. Felix made incomprehensible groaning noises when Andy tried to get him back to work, telling him that _SCIENCE_ needed him and the stories could tell themselves, didn’t need Felix’s pen to bring them anywhere, where did they want to go anyway, they could just take the bus like normal people. 

Often, Andy left him to his villainous monologues. Other times, he took his work to the lab so Felix would unfurl from his complex contortions on the sofa, sit at his cluttered desk and finally get to work for the lack of anyone to complain at.

They made it work okay, compiling rosters from grocery lists, Ellen pulling an afghan over Andy, smoothing back his fringe and pressing her lips affectionately to his forehead where he had fallen asleep on the cold living room floor. Once, for a week and a half, Felix left mash-ups of quotes by Roald Dahl and Gerard Way on Andy’s post-its _everywhere_ and Ellen retaliated by illustrating every single one of them, sticking the penultimate one on Felix’s chest while he was sound asleep. Andy got caught in the crossfire. He still kept every one he could find catalogued according to date and coloured post-it. 

They looked after their own, they were all they had.

Subsequently, Ellen moved out into her girlfriend’s shoebox of a flat. 

Then there were just two of them making those revolutions; Andy waking up at inordinate hours of the night to lay on the carpet of his bedroom floor yearning for rest and Felix on the other side of the wall, haunted by memories of his baby brother falling from a great height. Felix missed Ellen, the empty spot beside him to which he turned whenever he heard Black Sabbath come on the radio. He expanded prayers on her, scribbled talismans that he added to the piles that he’d spent their entire friendship accumulating. 

Ellen was his constant, she’d always been there and had become as much of him as he was of her. Occasionally, she came over with Lucy to eat their food and for board game nights, crashing on their lumpy spare mattress but it was never the same. 

But Andy and Felix made do. They missed each other sometimes, spent days just missing each other. Andy would put on his crumpled lab coat at 10pm, having given up entirely on rest. Felix only gave in to sleep at dawn. When he finally blinked awake groggily, bones gnawing on his insides like sandpaper, Andy’s door would be ajar and Felix would lose himself to moments stood outside looking in, running his gaze absently along the crinkled sheets creased under Andy’s sprawled figure. A pillow corner wedged in his gaping mouth and darkened by saliva.

By the time they sat down across from each other, the morning sun would be casting shadows of clouds through their threadbare curtains. Felix would settle his gaze on Andy. Gradually and gently, his bones shuddered to a halt. 

“It’s good to see you around,” he would said. Andy would hand him his mug of coffee, wordless, grateful. 

 

**\- 06**

Ellen always knew. 

“He’s a good one,” she told Felix. They were strolling to the shops, driven out by sudden cravings for cream cheese on toasted bagels and roasted marshmallows. Autumn was in full force, the trees half-bare with the weight of the growing chill, orange and red leaves scratching across the sidewalk like tumbleweed in the ol’ Wild West. 

Ellen tucked her hand into Felix’s jacket pocket. He pulled her close. 

“I know,” he replied, and thought of Andy the night before, with the television flickering light onto his face, his lists of Top Ten Felix Ferne Hits and last week when he had announced a campaign to make their flat the safest transgender space in the entire world. It evidently commenced with him changing into every dress he owned until he settled on that one that flared up around the waist and made him look like he just stepped out from the Forties.

“You deserve good, you know. You always think you don’t but you do.” Ellen poked his hip through wool, Felix nudged her with his skinny shoulder. 

“You’re good too, you’re the best, E. I don’t need anyone else.” Felix felt his eyebrows knit, and his gut kick like someone had grabbed his stomach and squeezed hard. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Ellen gave him a knowing glance. Felix pretended he didn’t see a flash of worry before she fell silent. 

 

**\- 07**

Felix didn’t know how Andy put up with him. With his moods that took a nose dive in the middle of conversations and sent him scrambling for quiet in his head. Sleep it off, play it off, write it off, till the air got thin and he got desperate and all he could muster was to curl up in bed with his eyes closed and breath wheeze-whoozing out of his nose. 

Some days other people took up more space than Felix could bear, when their mere presence sat heavy on his mind, cutting off the air to his throat and making bruises around his neck. He took to leaving instead. Closed and locked and hid the key to his bedroom door and put on his scratched Danger Days record, watched the needle traverse shakily across the vinyl with his duvet pulled to his chin and his ratty stuffed jellyfish sitting like a suspicious blanket lump on his chest. He smoked until the smell leaked from under his door and spread to the rest of the flat, until Andy had to set down ground rules that involved 1) smoking next to the window and 2) extinguishing cigarettes only on non-flammable materials. (This did not include wallpaper.) 

They devised a masterful solution to it. Andy says _I’ll knock short-fast-fast-fast and you can do short-fast-fast if you’re okay with me going in or just two knocks to say you’d rather be alone_ like it’s the most ingenious thing he’d ever come up with. 

Felix chewed on his lip rings for a moment, considering and then they shook on it. Andy beamed. _Felix and Andy in the morning?_  

Felix laughed, sang it back. 

 

**\+ 04**

_The Dysphoria Knock_ sounds like a ensemble swing piece. 

Felix tells Andy that one evening after they’ve both used it twice each in the past week. (Three short knocks and a slap of an open palm.) Then he proceeds to write a song that sounds exactly like an ensemble swing piece except with a rock band. It requires the use of a crowd shouting _down! down! down!_ between the lines of the chorus and smashed plates and catcalls. 

“This is _way_ wild,” Andy says after he’s listened the entire MIDI file through. Felix had substituted the smashed plates temporarily with holding down clashing C and D chords at the same time. 

“Exactly, it’s now a life goal to have it played live at least once.” Felix replies very proudly.

For a week after, he tries his best to catch Andy unawares in order to yell DOWN DOWN DOWN at him until Andy takes to wearing sound-cancelling headphones anywhere he can. 

 

**\- 08**

But Felix saw how Andy behaved with people he liked. 

Penelope with his hazel brown eyes and superior pancake-flipping techniques, how Andy stood between his knees at the kitchen counters, pink-cheeked and shy. Felix knew the way he stammered with people he wished to kiss, how his eloquence became inarticulate and chemical names turned disjointed like when he sat close with Ino at their dining table, their knees pressing and textbooks spread out over the surface. From his room, Felix had heard his words turn into pennies freefalling to find the spaces in the gutter.

Felix knew how Andy behaved with people he liked and it wasn’t Andy with Felix. It wasn’t Andy leaning loose and gentle against the kitchen counters in his worn grey sweater that hung so loose over his hips and Felix _ached_ with the urge to dip his fingers into the morning light that made a halo around his head. It wasn’t Andy pressing his face over the rim of his coffee mug so the heat steamed up his glasses nor him telling Felix about the new drug the company was testing. It wasn’t his wide-eyed fascination nor the clumsy way he slurped at his spaghetti like some kind of monster from a B-grade horror movie. It wasn’t him stealing the remote, or telling Felix to fuck off with an eyeroll, or walking around in one high heel, the other hooked through a belt loop, or all the billions of things he didn’t do when his dates were around. 

“He _like-_ likes you,” Ellen said, stirring that vile substance of molten orange-chocolate **.**

Felix knew how Andy behaved with people he like-liked. It wasn’t him with Felix. 

Felix really wanted to stop feeling like he needed him to be. 

 

**\- 09**

Then other times:

“I don’t even know how you can believe those things,” Andy said one time - or a variation of a million other times and it might be the last straw. Felix tensed up, shoulders stiff and voice careful, shuttered. He was suddenly done grumbling about his thesis around a mouthful of grilled chicken, suddenly not hungry, suddenly choked by a sour taste rising on his tongue. 

“What do you mean ‘those things’?” 

Andy cocked an eyebrow, shrugged and Felix was so fucking over this. He’d shaken it off enough times but now he was at the end of his rope, frayed and slipping. “I mean, magic isn’t real! It can’t be, there’s no basis for its existence, no proof, you can’t believe the time of day is gonna affect your result if you mix some buckwheat potion with salamander’s heart or something, I don’t know.” 

“Well, yeah, if you don’t know, maybe you just keep your fucking mouth shut.” Felix hissed, pushing his lunch away and swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. He felt like he’d been slapped, as if Andy had drawn his palm back and left an imprint of his fingers on his cheeks. 

“Why d’you always have to get so defensive about it, I’m just _saying._ Beliefs _have_ to be questioned,” Andy frowned, spreading his hands out, chopsticks clutched in the web of his index finger and thumb. Always the definition of levelheadedness and logic, Andy goddamn Lau. Felix hated him sometimes. 

“Maybe you should stop commenting on things you don’t know shit about.” Felix clambered to his feet, and Andy did too, their stances defensive. Their takeaway lunches laid left half-eaten on the coffee table. Felix wanted a fight, he wanted to destroy something, he wanted to make Andy snap. 

Andy chuckled, a bitter huff of breath. It twisted his face. “Yeah, you’re one to talk. What happened to ‘I’m on your side’, you’re always such a martyr.”

Felix shoved the remnants of his food into the trash bag under the kitchen sink. “Fuck you. You’re a real dick, Andy Lau, a real proper piece of work.” Then he slammed the door to his room, refusing to think about how much like a twelve year old he was behaving. He spent the afternoon alternating between justified anger and regret, blasting his playlist of the loudest Black Veil Brides songs and doodling song lyrics onto his old Chuck Taylor All Stars, words swinging over laces and dipping under heels.

He only emerged late that evening, forced out of hiding by hunger and thirst. Their African neighbours were singing in their kitchen. Felix could hear their voices wafting like the smell of spices through their shared balconies and paper thin walls; he wanted to housesit their puppy again, slump on the couch with Andy and the dog between them and pretend they were more than housemates. 

Andy’s bedroom door was shut. There was a furious typing sort of click-clacking coming from it, and Felix, distracted, almost overlooked the feeling of crinkly paper nudging against his toes. On the floor was a flat paper bag, and a pink sticky post-it scribbled with Andy’s unintelligible loopy cursive.

 _got this for your birthday. but  
_ _u should probably hv it nw. sorry i’m an arrogant idiot_

_\- dy_

Felix didn’t even bother pretending to work on his thesis after dinner. He cleaned out the top of their toilet sink and counter, knowing Andy had been meaning to for weeks and he did it to his new Conventional Weapons record while his turntable rested just on the boundaries of toilet and corridor. Then Felix scribbled a note on a post-it he’d nicked from Andy the Hoarder of Stationery Items, sticking it on the mirror for optimal viewing:

 _sry i called you a dick_  
 _you’re only a piece of work in the best way possible  
_ _a little like chopin_

_fe_

Researching Noongar traditions was entirely second priority to hundling on the fire escape outside his window. He sat balanced on his window ledge, smoking in his chequered boxers, oversized sweater and socks as the oncoming chill rattled over the rooftops. In the background, the same record played over and over and over again until the stars emerged and his dreams beckoned.

Slowly and expectedly, the night yawned a valley into his room, slipping shadows into corners as it dropped off lightly into dawn. 

 

**\+ 05**

They’re a little under a year into this whole housemate thing and a little more than five months into this romance situation when Felix starts going on research trips. 

He travels endless miles through the scorching desert to find water and new stories to listen to, sweat dripping from his back and soaking through his binder and shirt, leaves for days at a time, packing shirts and books like they’re of equal necessity. 

Andy watches him fold, arrange, fold, arrange with a tenacity that even he can’t comprehend. _Come home with a wild drop bear or two,_ he says with an upside down smile, his head hanging off the edge of their bed and Felix kisses his sniffly, swollen nose, reminding him to take his antihistamines. _Don’t stay out too long with your hiking club,_ he chides. Andy sticks out his tongue. 

After trundling over rocky roads, Felix comes home. His ears ring with each bump and pebble that caught in the engine, head spinning with all the times they had to get out and push. Felix returns to a flat that smells like incense, vanilla and cinnamon, to climb into bed with Andy, falling asleep comforted by another presence in his bed, another weight on the mattress. 

His ‘sensible shoes’ - that pair of Chuck Taylors with the lyrics - now soft with days of trekking, leave red dirt everywhere. Their vacuum cleaner is chock full of it. Their apartment is trails of the outback guiding Felix home and he makes a joke that he walks on poetry to find new poems, that words find each other because they’re meant to be. He says it with such conviction, preaching a sermon that his skin is bursting with, stories speeding across the landscapes of his body that it takes a life of its own. 

 _It’s a little like magic,_ he says and Andy starts to believe too. 

For nights after every trip, Felix falls asleep dreaming of Andy as the hero to all of his stories - the one that saves them all. 

 

**\- 10**

Felix finally gave in, took to sleeping in Andy’s bed on bad nights.

The first time he did the moon hung low and full in the sky. He turned from his sleeplessness and saw that it was nearly yellow in the darkness. An owl hooted. His heart hurt from the way life bore down on him, crushing and suffocating like when Oscar used to sit on his chest and declare himself winner. Now he was neither winner nor loser, neither success nor failure. Everything was difficult these days.

Convincing himself that getting out of bed was the hardest part. But he thought about the perfect hugs that Andy gave, how he would wind his arms around Felix and hold him until he exhaled slowly into his shoulder, and suddenly Felix was climbing into bed with Andy, hoping he was already asleep. 

Andy made an incoherent questioning noise that sounded a little like _Fe._ Felix shushed him, curled up and allowed himself the soft press of Andy’s hand in his own.

*

One night became two, became three in a week then every night. Evenings of Felix bumping against Andy’s feet in bed and falling asleep before Andy did, trying to stay awake in the glare of the bedside lamp and Andy’s silhouette. Late nights jerking awake to find someone else’s breathing to fall asleep to, that slow, giving rise and fall, as reliable as the way moonlight fell across Andy’s face in the dark and Felix couldn’t help watching, clenching his arms so it made it harder to reach out and touch. 

(Habits had always been hard to break. Felix was finding that the ones that made him less lonely and Andy so much closer were the hardest of them all.)

 

**\+ 06**

The day that the laws change and Australia recognises non-binary genders, Andy makes dinner and Felix brings home wine. It’s unplanned and unspoken celebration.

They eat lemon chicken and spaghetti; Felix’s long given up on asking about Andy’s dietary preferences. Desserts are Golden Gaytimes - the most apt ice-creams for the occasion - and spooning in front of the television while Andy watches Elementary and Felix lifts hair from the smooth, pale skin of his neck to scatter chaste kisses there, keeping them considerable distance apart because Andy gets ticklish. 

When on the screen Joan finds some level of closure, Andy wriggles around and kisses Felix full on his lips. 

“I love you,” he says. “I can’t say how much I do, it is _literally_ impossible. Words do not suffice.” 

“It’s okay,” Felix says. He clambers onto his knees, braces himself on both sides of Andy’s hips. He watches Andy watching him, leans down on his hands. “I love you too, a lot” and kisses him, cloaked by the waterfall of his overgrown fringe and their intertwined hands.

 

**\- 11**

“I like you,” Andy whispered in the dark on a late Saturday night. Felix was exhausted a moment ago, but now he’s wide-awake.

Andy said it again. _I like you so much I think it might be something else._  

“You should say that again, Dy. I think I might be dreaming.” Felix ran his eyes down the curve of Andy’s side against the moonlight; he was not breathing either. 

Andy repeated himself. Felix folded back the covers carefully and reached for the bedside lamp.

“But you’ve been dating. There’ve been Penny and Ino, they were really cute,” was the first thing that presented itself to his lips. He wasn’t thinking straight, everything had been weird and wrong and he wanted to go to bed but Andy was blinking the darkness from his eyes and sitting up.

“It’s different.” He frowned, pulling the blankets to his stomach.

Strangely, it occurred to Felix then that he’d never really seen Andy without his spectacles before, that his eyes were dark brown in the dim light and there were two dimples at the sides of his nose where they sat in the day. He wanted to lean over to make their shadows join hands.

“How?” Felix dared to ask and Andy exhaled carefully. 

“I wanted to kiss all of them but let’s be real, I want to kiss everyone.”

Felix nudged his knee teasingly. “Like that guy on the bus with the Adventure Time badges on his bag?”

Andy blushed, shoved out at him. “Shut up,” he said and quieted. The moment lengthened before them, filled with the cries of crickets and the sound of their faraway city at their feet. “No, with you - with you, I want to build a home.” Then his eyes widened almost comically and Felix had to grab him before he flailed himself off the bed. “Was that too much too soon, I can never tell I -” 

“I like you too,” Felix mumbled, suddenly shy. His voice was scratchy with insomnia. He wanted to clear his throat but Andy’s hopeful eyes were fixed on him and it felt like he was treading on blown glass. “I’ve liked you for an awful long time.” 

Andy looked at him in surprise, mouth opening and closing, gaping a little. “My hypothesis was right, I just took too long to triple-check...” He lifted his finger to push up his glasses, but he wasn’t wearing them. He stared at Felix in surprise and Felix had to huff a laugh. “I just - Wow. Yeah. Okay, this is great, isn’t it!”

Felix sighed melodramatically. “You’re ridiculous,” he said fondly. 

Andy wrinkled his nose. “Well. You’re ridiculous too. And I’m going back to bed.” He threw himself back onto his pillow with a muffled _floomp!_ , pulled the covers to his chin, waiting for Felix to turn off the lamp.

But when he laid down, Felix pulled Andy close and press his face into the thin cotton of his undershirt. It smelt like their laundry detergent and Andy’s perfume; vanilla and cinnamon. He thought about Andy’s face in the dim glow, his _I like you, I like you_ and _with you I want to build a home._

He felt Andy’s arm wrap around him, fingers clutching the hem at the neck of Felix’s t-shirt. 

The night felt gentler on his mind. 

*

The next morning, Felix was hunched over the coffee table when Andy stumbled out of bed. His face was riddled with pillow marks and his hair stuck up, glasses sitting askew on his nose. 

Felix groaned loudly to acknowledge his presence. It was a very endeared groan. Andy absent-mindedly bent to kiss the top of his head, resting his hand over his hair a moment longer than necessary as he blinked sleep from his eyes and struggled to stay awake. In response, Felix dug his head out from the pile of his arms to cast him a sideways glance, then stayed afloat to look on as Andy tipped hot water down his filter paper cone.

“Do it again,” Felix demanded and watched with half lidded eyes as Andy poured out his coffee and shuffled over to kiss his hair again, this time sliding his hand down so his fingers could scratch lightly. 

“It’s nice to be able to do that,” he said taking a seat, drinking with one hand because Felix had poached his other hand for nefarious petting purposes. 

Felix hummed, kissed the middle of his palm and stole his coffee in reply.

 

**\+ 07**

After the show, Andy dragged Felix home so quickly he almost got whiplash. Through the deserted carpark behind the venue, Andy murmured _I want you to suck me off, I want you stretch me out then fuck me from behind with my hands on the headboard_ , hot breath slipping against Felix’s skin like fingers inching up bare thighs. It took Felix all of his strength and few last shreds of dignity not to push Andy up against the hood of a car - _any car_ \- and suck him off roughly through the open zipper of his trousers. 

Andy gets that way after shows, after seeing Felix screaming his words on stage, watching his fringe falling completely over his eyes and sweat dripping from his chin. Ellen has taken to wriggling her eyebrows at them, making increasingly outlandish excuses to get away. Tonight’s star was _I have a metaphysical kitten to tame._ One day Felix was going to jot them all down in a notebook and read it out back to her in a Morgan Freeman impersonation. 

But right now he’s pushing Andy back into bed, noting with satisfaction that Andy’s wearing his favourite boxers, the Adventure Time one that he’s worn holes through but still insists on keeping. It means Felix can hover an inch above his cock and exhale and Andy feels it as if on his skin. Andy groans, hips canting hopefully, tugging at Felix’s hair, pulling at him until he’s panting into Andy’s collarbones.

Felix straightens, pulling his shirt off. His skin’s still slick from the show, the heat of the approaching summer and Andy slides his palm across the plane of his back, stretching out on pristine sheets before Felix, begging _touch me, fuck, I want you, Fe, please._ It’s obscene, how wanton he is laid out on plain white, his pupils darkened and blown out wide. His chest is flushed. Felix trails his nails over a purple spot on his chest, just above his nipple, right where he’d sucked and bruised two days ago.

He drags his teeth over Andy’s swollen lips, kissing a trail down the faint hair on his chest. “I’m going to,” he promises, slicking himself up while he licks a broad stripe on the underside of Andy’s dick. Andy’s exhale drops off helplessly and the inhale doesn’t come, not when Felix pushes in one finger, coiling it on every downward stroke he makes. 

“More,” Andy whispers, strained and Felix holds down his hitching hips. “Fe, come on, I can take more. Give me more.” 

“Fucking demanding bottom.” Felix presses in deep, adds another finger, keeps Andy down even when he’s trying to rock up. He kisses the head, licking with the hard tip of his tongue, tasting salt. 

Andy’s leg kicks out reflexively, he wraps them around Felix’s midrift. “You like it though, you like it when I talk dirty to you. I know you get off on it when I’m not around to eat you out.” His fingers find Felix’s nipples through his binder, and he’s pressing the heel of his hand against one. Felix’s fingers jerk, curl sharply. 

Andy whimpers.

“Fuck yeah, like that.” He’s fucking back on Felix’s fingers, chewing on his bottom lip until it’s tender and bright red, his nails are scratching grooves in Felix’s back. 

Felix slides his cock over Andy’s hole, lube making movement slippery and Andy gasps, jerking backwards, trying to catch friction. Felix pushes in altogether, bottoming out in the first stroke and Andy twists under him.

“Wait, wait.” Felix pulls out and Andy whines, high and desperate. He coaxes Andy to his knees. “Face the wall,” he says and Andy scrambles to follow. Then Felix, bracing himself with one hand on the wall and one arm around Andy’s waist, lets his dick press up into his ass. He waits for Andy to push back, winding a hand around Felix’s neck to pull him into a kiss before he thrusts in again.

Andy’s breath hitches. He groans, head dropping in front as Felix keeps a fast pace, fucking him in quick, short thrusts. The sound of skin slapping skin is loud in the room, Andy’s breaths coming increasingly wretched.

He’s making tiny _ah, ah, ah_ sounds and every thrust sends heat building at the bottom of Felix’s stomach, his strap-on pushing into himself, teasing his hole. Felix reaches around, curls his hand around Andy’s cock, his hand slick with lube and precome. Andy moans. His hips jerking between Felix’s dick in his ass and fucking his fist and small and helpless _fuck, fuck oh fuck I’m going to, I’m gonna -_

And he’s tensing and squirting all over Felix’s hand, hips still working with the force of Felix’s thrusts into him, crying out when Felix stiffens and comes.

 

**00**

“You were sleeping-talking again last night,” Felix mentions in the morning. Andy’s got his glasses on and he’s leaning a hip against a drawer handle, just where Felix had cupped his skin two days ago and made a mark. Felix wants so badly to kiss him now, push him against the kitchen counter and slip his cold hands on his warm, warm back. 

Andy hums questioningly, lenses fogging up over the rim of his coffee mug. Felix sidles close.

“Nothin’ much, just that I’m pretty much the best boyfriend in the world.” He drops his hands into Andy’s jumper pockets, fully intending to keep them there until they feel adequately not-freezing.

Andy rolls his eyes fondly. “And I’m supposed to be the nerd.” 

See, Felix has a really _really_ good comeback to that, but he’s pressing his lips to Andy’s, tasting black coffee and bracing the length of his palm across his jaw. It’ll have to wait. 

 

**fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic for my Gee. I'm grateful for everything that you are and choose to be. Happy A-day, pretty boy. You make me ♥(✿ฺ´∀`✿ฺ)ﾉ all the time. This is a little late but we've been busy anyway so I reckoned today was okay. In answer to your ask, yes that tag was for this, which was also the thing I couldn't tell you about. It was really really difficult keeping this a secret, you know how bad I am at secrets, honestly I was so tempted a few times a day to just tell you bUT WEH. I've been working on this for a few weeks now, and it kinda of broke my brain but I love you a lot and hope you like it. I hope things get less busy for the both of us so I can tell you all the headcanons that I have about this verse now ♥ ♥
> 
> I honestly don't know how this happened, it's the second longest thing I've ever wrote. I thought I could do like 2k words tops and somehow it spawned to this. So massive MASSIVE props to my beta and best friend Cheryl who's been reading my words for years and still knows when to shut me down with love and gentility. ♥ ♥


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